Calypso Heat Wave

The first feature pairing singer/actor Johnny Desmond with starlet Merry Anders before the crime thriller ESCAPE FROM SAN QUENTIN was CALYPSO HEAT WAVE, more befitting Desmond's lifestyle being about the music business, and with Desmond a singer albeit calypso instead of standard popular ballads...

And recently, anyone who saw veteran icon Alan Arkin serenade his Pandemic fans might not know, he's wasn't merely an actor who could sing but a bonafide former musician/singer that, a decade after playing with his band The Tarriers during the11th hour gig that everything leads to, had an extremely soulful voice...

Yet the most important character is the villain: like deadly convict Richard Devon not only stole but completely controlled ESCAPE FROM SAN QUENTIN, it's Italian mobster-looking character-actor Michael Granger, playing the crooked (albeit in a goofy over-the-top fashion) owner of a monopolizing jukebox company that will only back (or play) certain artists and, basically, without him no one has a chance... especially Desmond's Johnny Conroy, whose career might vanish before it begins...

Meanwhile, Merry Anders plays the perfect-woman record company assistant, and sometimes seems she could be the perfect girlfriend for singer Desmond, only she's dating the friendly yet beguiled owner of a more honest record company compared to the bad guy...

And had jukebox-selling villain Granger's Barney Peel been a gangster, and this film led to a criminal robbery or getaway instead of a concert, it'd be what it almost is anyhow: a lightweight yet often suspenseful calypso exploitation that also features the first live performance by Maya Angelou along with a young and energetic, extremely hard-working music company employee Joel Grey...

Who has a huge crush on the villain's floozy moll Meg Myles, whose would-be music career winds up meaning more than the surrounding legitimate acts... all being promoted by this low-budget Fred S. Sears programmer.

Another Sam Katzman Special which somehow manages to work. A mobbed-up jukebox operator goes into the song production business and turns out to have a knack for finding talent.

A large part of the movie's success is due to the effective and subtle camera work of Benjamin Kline, a man who worked as cinematographer for fifty years, for talents as diverse as Tom Mix and the Three Stooges. In this one he gives you a lot of long, leisurely takes with a slowly moving camera during the story scenes and then switches tempo effectively for the musical numbers.

A kind word should also be reserved for director Fred Sears, who averaged five movies a year and had a busy acting career going -- and died in his mid-forties the year he made this. The decent performances he gets out of poor actors indicates, as few others of his cheapjack movies do, that had he lived longer, he might have turned into a very good director.

There's also a chance to play 'spot the talent'. Try to find Joel Grey a decade before his Broadway breakout in CABARET and even Maya Angelou. It's amazing the talent that Katzman could pick up on the cheap -- even when he couldn't think of what to do with it.

The plot is representative of what often times happens in the music and film world. Who is who contacts, sponsors who can drop money into a record label or film production can frequently try to overtake the direction. The story is about the struggle to do what you believe in.

What I found most interesting was the selection of music. Finding Maya Angelou singing and dancing was quite a treat. This was her first film, I prefer her as a poet. Also The Treniers a long forgotten 50's rock/blues/jazz group and the Hi Los/s with theirbeautiful harmonizing voices. The dance numbers focused on calypso of course, but cheesy… All in all a C movie but by watching it I was able to revive a connection to the music of the 50's era.